For the "redistributable license", meaning you use the data for something other than mailing junk mail, the price went from 4K to around 45K per year. FYI, USPS licensed data of the same kind is around 2K. The same phenomenon happened in Australia (it was about 80K IIRC), again asserting bogus copyright claims over public information.

From personal experience, Canada Post increased ten-fold their database licensing costs. My company tried to negotiate, and the best CP proposed is some rebates for the first two years, so of course we had to drop them. So, Geocoder, good luck!

I'm in Canada, and there's a "Call phone" item under the Chat section in Gmail. Installed the plugin, and it works for free for Canadian and US phone numbers. Of course, I don't have a full Google Voice account, but hey free calls are good enough.

Shashtel writes: "http://geeksdatabase.com/twitter-clients-for-mac/
In the last couple of months Twitter has become a sort of internet sensation among netizens. Everyone tweets, be it Celebrities, Developers or Websites, bumping up the number of followers seems to be the latest trend. Keeping up with the trends there has been an explosion of sorts in the Twitter clients. Every developer..."

Rorschach1 writes: "Words cannot describe how I have come to loathe my current smart phone — a Samsung SCH-i760 running Windows Mobile 6. It locks up frequently, the user interface is unresponsive and unreliable, sound quality is poor, Bluetooth support sucks; I could fill volumes describing the things I hate about this phone, but it was an incident yesterday that solidified the decision to ditch it: My car was hit broadside by an SUV on my way home from work. There were no injuries, and I was able to make an initial call to 911 (which I could have done with the ancient backup phone in my glove compartment if necessary) but immediately after the 911 call the phone freaked out. Calling family and a tow truck required multiple resets, with the phone apparently stuck in emergency mode and once just shutting down completely.

An iPhone isn't an option because AT&T coverage is awful where I live, and Verizon is the only viable provider. The GSM phone I travel with doesn't even get a signal in my house. I will never, ever use another Windows-based phone. On the other hand, I don't think I really need a Blackberry. I rarely use email on my phone (granted, that's mostly because it's so impossible to use on my Samsung) but I'd miss the QWERTY keyboard and ability to occasionally access Google and Wikipedia if I went with a plain old phone.

I miss the reliability of my old E815, and I like the volume and sound quality on my GSM V400. If I could get something as solid as either of those with a half-decent browser and usable keyboard, I'd be very happy. I don't care about playing music, taking pictures, ringtones, downloadable apps, or any of that — I just want a communications device that works right the first time, every time. Does such a beast exist?

Whoever picks a satisfactory replacement for me gets to decide the fate of my SCH-i760. I'll leave the options open, but I should mention that I have about 20 liters of liquid nitrogen on hand and an 8-lb sledge hammer."

One of my favorite things from this year's CES is a low-end handheld device aimed basically at teenagers (but I'm mostly a teenager in my overall lifestyle, by some measures) called the Movit, from a company called Giinii.

sausaw writes: "I recently had to write code in a hot dusty room for 20 days with temperatures near 107F (~41C); having nothing to sit on; a 64 Kbps inconsistent internet connection; warm water for drinking and a lot of distractions and interruptions. I am sure many people have been in similar situations and would like to know your experiences."

benad writes: A lot of people have been chattering about the improvements Windows 7 brings for Windows users, but how does it compare to Ubuntu in real-world tests? We put Ubuntu 8.10, Windows Vista and Windows 7 through their paces in both 32-bit and 64-bit tests to see just how well Ubuntu faces the new contender. And, just for luck, we threw in a few tests using Jaunty Jackalope with ext4.

Maybe, just maybe, lots of DRM validation is actually done by Java code itself. The JVM chips in most Blu-ray players are made for "multimedia experience", not massive data crunching to validate the encryption keys. So DRM is still to blame.

The key is knowing how to draw bright lines between different parts of the system. That's a legal term, and in this case it means a line between the Free Software and the rest of the system, that is "bright" in that the two pieces are very well separated, and there is no dispute that one could be a derivative work of the other, or infringes on the other in any way. All of the Free Software goes on one side of that line, and all of the lock-down stuff on the other side."